Newsletter
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IN THIS EDITION:
- “Complex threats” and Canada’s food system
- New expert panel: Optimizing Canada’s research infrastructure
- Readings on measles outbreaks, AI search accuracy, the National Quantum Strategy Roadmap, and more
- Revisiting the impacts of Canada’s Top Climate Change Risks
“Complex threats” and Canada’s food system
In a new op-ed for The Hill Times, CCA’s Becky Chapman details the critical role that innovation plays in Canada’s agricultural resilience—a pressing concern at a time of overlapping pressures, including climate change and unsteady trade relationships. “Agriculture is an important contributor to Canada’s economy and way of life,” Chapman, portfolio director for environment, security, and society, writes. “It is imperative that we innovate to safeguard the stability and success of our food system even as serious and complex threats continue to mount.”
Drawing on a suite of CCA assessments—on risks to plant health, gene-editing approaches to pest control, and atypical food production—Chapman spotlights critical enabling technologies that might increase agricultural productivity, lessen climate and pest-related risks, and enable greater food availability. Such technologies require “a range of high-tech skills” as well as policy leadership that prizes “intergovernmental collaboration, public engagement, and strategic investment.”
“Building resilience in our food system means supporting research and development with regulations to keep pace with scientific advancements,” Chapman writes. “Stronger collaboration among federal and provincial policymakers, industry leaders, and researchers is essential to ensure that Canada remains competitive on the global stage. Meaningful and continuous engagement with Indigenous communities, including respective inclusion of Indigenous knowledges and recognition of Indigenous rights, are also critical pieces for developing and successfully implementing new tools to increase the resiliency of the food systems overall.”
Chapman’s full op-ed in The Hill Times is available to subscribers. To learn more about atypical food production technologies for Canadian food security, visit our project page or download a one-page infographic.
Readings and Events
- A recent measles outbreak in southwestern Ontario has already resulted in more cases than in the previous decade combined, according to the Globe and Mail. Total cases for Canada in 2024 are greater than any year since 2014. An official with Public Health Ontario told the paper that such a number hasn’t been seen “since before measles was considered eliminated in Canada” in 1998.
- Researchers with the Tow Center for Digital Journalism recently evaluated eight AI-powered search tools for accuracy, finding that chatbots “were generally bad at declining to answer questions they couldn’t answer correctly, offering incorrect or speculative answers instead.” The problems “recur across all the prominent generative search tools that we tested.”
- In other funding news, a graduate of Polytechnique Montréal donated $50 million to the engineering school to support the development of a “disruptive innovation hub,” reports the Canadian Press. Meanwhile, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and the National Research Council of Canada announced a joint $11 million contribution to support a number of collaborative projects on quantum sensing technologies, according to Quantum Insider.
- The Public Health Agency of Canada recently published Vision 2030: Moving Data to Public Health Action, “an adaptable and collaborative public health surveillance ‘system of systems’ able to provide timely insights for actions.” The report draws on Connecting the Dots, a report from the CCA’s Expert Panel on Health Data Sharing. Amol Verma, a member of the expert panel, recently detailed the value of “unified Canadian health data” in a Globe and Mail op-ed.
- “Basically, without the vaccines, we would’ve not made it out of the pandemic,” Stephan Lewandowsky, a member of the CCA’s Expert Panel on the Socioeconomic Impacts of Health and Science Misinformation, recently told the Association of Health Care Journalists. “But of course that hasn’t stopped misinformation from being awash on the internet.” Lewandowsky drew on his panel’s report, Fault Lines, to illustrate the stakes of vaccine misinformation; watch the webinar.
- The Government of Canada recently published its National Quantum Strategy Roadmap, a guide to its efforts to make Canada “a world leader in the continued development, deployment and use of quantum computing hardware and software.” In Quantum Potential, the CCA’s Expert Panel on the Responsible Adoption of Quantum Technologies wrote that “national as well as sector- and technology-specific roadmaps can help stakeholders identify and address various challenges impeding the adoption and commercialization of quantum technologies.” Read the report.
